February 11, 2000

Magnolia

By Peter M. Nichols

VIOLENCE A police officer is shot at and there is often a feeling of impending violence.

SEX There are glimpses of sex acts and much plain discussion of the subject.

PROFANITY Obscenities throughout.

FOOTNOTE Drugs, medicinal and recreational, are consumed voraciously.

FOR WHICH CHILDREN?

AGES 15 AND UP Some older teenagers mention being attracted by the film's cool preview and appealing television commercials. Once in attendance, however, they tend to find the movie too long, too dark and totally without comic relief, not the way to score with this audience.

here are a lot of private lives in the San Fernando Valley, and Mr. Anderson, director of ''Boogie Nights,'' gets into at least half of them in a mosaic of a film that takes three hours to put the pieces together, and then none too neatly.

Start with old Earl Partridge (Mr. Robards), a television mogul who lies dying of cancer and lamenting past indiscretions that prompted him to desert his 14-year-old son at a time of crisis. Feeling no small amount of guilt herself, Earl's young wife (Ms. Moore) wails her regrets about the many times she cheated on him and quaffs a good portion of her husband's painkillers.

Elsewhere in the valley a morose former child television quiz show star (Mr. Macy) watches a young genius named Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) whip all comers on the current show ''What Do Kids Know?''

Behind the scenes, the host, Jimmy Gator (Mr. Hall) is as doomed by cancer as Earl Partridge and just as guilty about his extramarital dalliances and mistreatment of his daughter, Claudia (Ms. Walters).

And in auditoriums full of men feeling sorry for themselves, a strutting macho cult figure, Frank T. J. Mackey (Mr. Cruise), preaches that ''it's not what you deserve, it's what you take.''

Mr. Anderson keeps these and other characters in motion. Suddenly they all start singing the same song and later, as if in a biblical epic, it starts raining frogs. Everybody is alarmed except Stanley. ''It's something that happens,'' he says.